Intel Vice President Gregory Bryant has shared the first official image of Intel's new Alder Lake CPUs on Twitter today. One of Intel's employees can be seen holding two Alder Lake chips, showing both the front and the rear of the large CPU, which is designed to be housed in a new, larger LGA 1700 socket. Although we have already seen tons of unofficial pictures of Alder Lake, the Twitter post provides a strong hint that the new CPU is almost here.
Coming soon to PCs globally: #12thGen Intel Core processors. We can’t wait to show you the experiences they unlock! #IntelOn pic.twitter.com/nrCDextcITOctober 6, 2021
Unfortunately, Bryant did not share or hint at an official releases date for the new architecture, but at least he told us a release is "coming soon", and we get to see what the Alder Lake chips really look, though from a distance. Keep in mind that the image is probably a marketing stunt. Usually, fully built CPUs are not retrievable inside the fabs, so the person wearing the bunny suit in the photo probably grabbed the chip off a retail package to show it off in Intel's testing facility.
As far as an accurate release date goes -- the best info we currently have is a rumored release date of either November 4th or 19th for Intel's 12th Gen Core Alder Lake CPUs. This rumor could likely be true as we've started to see new Z690 motherboards appear from online retailers, and more leaked benchmarks have appeared in the wild. Bryant's Twitter post could also be hinting at this release time, although it is a stretch.
Alder Lake could be one of the most exciting CPU launches we've seen in a long time from Intel, with the new architecture marking Intel's first steps beyond 14nm in the desktop market, along with numerous other improvements.
Alder Lake will be a significantly enhanced and diverse architecture compared to Rocket Lake and previous 14nm architectures. Featuring a new hybrid core layout -- similar to ARM's big.LITTLE strategy, and much higher performance with a promised 19% IPC improvement over Rocket Lake. This is not to mention support for newer, and faster DDR5 memory which combined could make 12th Gen the best gaming CPUs on the market until AMD releases Zen 4.
In fact, Intel is so confident in Alder Lake, that Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger declared AMD's lead is over in a recent interview with CRN. The chief executive said that AMD has done a good job over the last couple of years, but that's now over with Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids on the horizon.
